[In the following excerpt, Abel asserts that Raj eloquently illustrates the lives of Indians, particularly Indian women, and their interpersonal relationships with each other and with British colonists in the early to mid-twentieth century.]

Raj by Gita Mehta, the new rival to Paul Scott, author of Jewel in the Crown, is a novel of stature. The plot is as sentimental and ordinary as many other tales of the Indian Continent under British rule: but Gita Mehta brings to this scenario a freshness and depth unusual in a romance of the Orient. Her plot concerns Jaya, a Princess raised in purdah who inevitably falls in love with a handsome young Englishman. Forced to marry a dissolute, unattractive Indian Prince, she later has an affair with a politically radical but heartless Casanova. Nonetheless, Jaya emerges a resolute, politically mature and well-balanced lady, bearing a suspicious resemblance to Indira Ghandi. But there is more to the novel than it seems so trite a plot could bear.

Written by an Indian woman, one moreover who finished her education at Cambridge, the book is marked out by its acceptance of the traditional culture of the Maharajahs which the author can show effortlessly, without self-conscious explanations of the kind which even Paul Scott, being English, needs to deploy in Jewel in the Crown. Gita Mehta also understands, without trying, the peculiar chemistry of the Anglo-Indian relationship. She depicts the irresistible attraction of the Western ethic for high-born Indian nationals. The contrasts between the extreme poverty of the masses and the wealth of the Indian elite are shown with exceptional clarity, yet with an innate understanding of the philosophy of the Princes and of the bloodthirsty warrior class in all its medieval arrogance. Simultaneously she knows the meaning of the conservatism of her parents, already an anachronism in the early 1900s, and the choice of a freer democracy for her own generation.

The two alternatives, conveyed by the men in her life, show Mehta the failings of both sides of the Indian struggle, the British and the nationalist. But above all they reveal the inherent contradiction in the English habit of requiring the Princes and professionals to adopt British ideas of democracy and at the same time treating all Indians, whether high or lowly born, as inferior. The women came out of purdah into a different but equally unhappy bondage: it seemed like slavery with a twist, and was just as unacceptable. On the other side, the Nationalists imagined a smooth transition to Western theories of statehood for the inhabitants of an already deeply divided land, full of physical and spiritual contrasts.

The heroine's decision to embrace political life might well be seen as a reflection of Indira Ghandi's life: her ambition was to reconcile the aspirations of Westernized, educated Indians with those of the masses for reasonably stable living conditions. The author's feeling for the innermost desires of all the protagonists makes her contribution to the fiction and history of present-day India an important one.